


Anywhere but Here

by Hyperius (Euregatto)



Series: Where We Won't Be Found [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dreamsharing, F/M, First Kiss, First Meetings, Hurt/Comfort, Inappropriate Use of the Force, Luke gives Ben his scar, Pre-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Sharing a Bed, Some spoilers for TLJ
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-02-23 10:10:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13187898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euregatto/pseuds/Hyperius
Summary: She wants to be afraid, she wants to approach it, but a set of hands grapple her shoulders and she slams back into her own reality, trembling, gasping for breath. Her heart is violently throwing itself against her chest. She clutches Ben’s lightsaber to her breastbone even as she struggles to reject it.Ben's grip is gentle, careful. “Rey. Don’t be afraid, I’m here.”





	Anywhere but Here

**Author's Note:**

> **Alternatively** : Reeling from his uncle's betrayal, an injured Ben Solo lands on the harsh and desolate planet Jakku, where he finds temporary refuge with a Force-sensitive scavenger.
> 
> Just a bit of an AU I decided to write and get more practice off, playing with the idea of Ben meeting Rey prior to TFA. Note: Rey's age is elevated. Enjoy!  
> [ I've been longing for a son like you / I've been searching for a way out too / and somebody - somebody's looking for you.](https://youtu.be/cIzM9p3dUm8)

*

  

   

   

Ben Solo awakens in a blind panic to an unfamiliar metallurgic ceiling and an intense burning in his ribs that’s painful enough to _choke_ on. None of this is redundant to him, lacking a semblance of the temple and the energy of the Force, which once pulsed freely through every root and crevice of the planet like a heartbeat. Despite it, a subdued part of him entertains the thought – the sonance of shouts from the other Padawans as they cordially begin their day without him, the protracted tails of sunlight glaring in through the window.

No, this place is willfully silent.

He sits up on the bedroll, perched on a raise in the room’s unusual structure. His mind is reeling with alarm, with _memories_ – he anticipates the incandescent green against a rigid black backdrop, illuminating the animosity, the outright murderous intent in his beloved uncle’s once gentle eyes and the pull of the ceiling, crashing _crushing_ –

_“BEN!”_

A shadow crosses into his field of vision.

His arm snaps up and energy bends around it, constricting the shadow’s throat like a noose. The Force tightens the more it struggles until the only measure that keeps its neck from breaking is Ben’s sliver of self-control. He pins it back against the wall with furor in every inch of applied pressure. The shadow gasps for air, clawing at her skin, tears diving down her cheeks –

_A girl?_

He eases the tension on her throat. The girl chokes, greedily intaking her lost breaths. Her gaze is stringent despite the dread in her eyes, and she attempts to brace against the vehement Force affixing her to the wall.

“Who sent you?” he demands to know, and then louder, pushing her further back until she’s gasping in pain, “Did _he_ send you to kill me?”

“I – I don’t know”—she gasps for air again—"what you’re talking about!”

Ben pursues the racing thoughts of her mind, briefly, and finds that she’s telling the truth. He draws close, a pained limp to his step but he’s otherwise tall and malignant, an intimidating, dangerous force to be reckoned with, akin to a cornered animal. Finally he eases up, slowly lowering her to the floor. Every painful inch is met with her watchful glare.

He exhales. In a begrimed, broken section of the mirror on the wall to his right, he sees himself. He sees the meager cuts, the little wounds that will heal. Then he sees the jagged, horrifying burn from his uncle’s lightsaber, driving its way up the right side of his chest, his shoulder, his cheek, resolving just above his eye. Anger wells in the pit of his chest.

In his distraction, the girl grabs her quarterstaff and ducks out the door. “Wait,” Ben tries to say, stumbling as he follows her out of the strange room.

The sun’s heat is comparative to a wave of fire that gushes over Ben’s body. He’s wearing only his pants and boots, and his bare chest and exposed burn feel like they might blister against the torridity of the environment.

The girl backs across the body of the fallen AT-AT walker, her staff raised defensively. “Get away from me, Monster!”

He could break that staff of hers in half with just the Force, or he could send it sailing into the sand nearby. But she’s frightened by his power already, and Ben is beginning to feel a pang of guilt for lashing out against the girl who had been – well, what was she doing? Trying to save his life?

He offers out his hand. “Don’t run. I’m sorry.”

She watches him, reaffirming her grasp on the salvaged quarterstaff. Ben can see it’s been welded together from scraps and lightsaber parts, which surprises him a little. A battleground, here on Jakku?

After a moment, he tries to get through to her again. “It was not my intention to hurt you.”

“Did a fine job of proving otherwise,” she snaps back, taking another cautious step away from him.

Ben retracts his hand and brings his fingers to the edges of the burn on his face. “As you can see, the last person I trusted left _this_. Can you blame me for assuming the worst of a stranger?” He pauses, allowing her a chance to counter, but is met with terse silence. “I ask only your forgiveness.”

The girl keeps her guard up, but she slowly loosens her stance. “Where are you from?” she asks him tentatively. “Certainly not from around here, not with the way you talk. I’d think your previous life was almost posh.”

Something like that. “You may call my life what you will,” he replies coolly, holds out his hand again, and says nothing more.

Eventually she approaches him, accepting his gesture. The greetings on this planet are different than what Ben is accustomed to, because the girl slides her hand up to his forearm and gently grabs hold. He feels the Force shift around him. Something is amiss among the stars.

“I’m Rey,” she says.

“Rey. I’m Ben.”

“Are you a Jedi? You can make things float with your mind, so you must be.” She leans on her staff, giving him a charmed smile and he feels heat rising in his face. “I’ve never met a Jedi before. I was starting to think your kind was nothing more than a myth.”

“We would be better off a myth.”

Her smile drops. “Oh. Well, you should come inside before you burn. Jakku’s not a place to be without proper protection.”

Ben watches her pass him by, ducking into her converted home. He follows quickly. “Rey,” he starts, his eyes fixed on her back as she sets her staff down against the wall, and then his attention trails up to the marks etched into the chrome plating, “how did I get here?”

“I heard you just last night – when you crashed about seven clicks east of here.”

He locates his bag by the bedroll and rifles through it, uncovering a handful of the clothes he had thrown in prior to escaping from the temple (and rightfully burning it to the ground). “Is this all you brought from the ship?” he asks her, carefully pulling a plain shirt over his head because the wound branded into his body screams if he moves too subtly.

She has her back turned to him, her arms folded. Ben can feel her embarrassment emanating. “I couldn’t carry much else. You were _partially_ conscious, I’m surprised you don’t remember.”

He pulls on his hooded cloak, shoulders the bag, and ducks out the door. Rey glances between him and the empty bedroll once, twice, a third time before taking up her quarterstaff again and trekking after him.

“Wait!” she exclaims. “Wait, is that it? Are you leaving?”

Ben looks at her quizzically. “Of course. I have somewhere to be.” He glimpses her once over, as if she’s reminded him of something beyond her understanding. He casts up his hood. “Thank you, Rey. Be well.”

“Oh. Okay. Bye, Ben.”

She watches him go until he’s nothing more than a silhouette against the backdrop of the Jakku horizon, and Rey shoulders off the thought of him in favor of the rest of the day ahead of her. There were ships to scavenge, and she had a family to wait for.

Ben would soon be nothing more than a distant memory.

   

  

  

*

   

  

  

Ben Solo finds the X-Wing starship half submerged in sand. It’s mostly in tact but buried none-the-less, and he suspects that repairing the minor damages from the influx of dirt could take upwards of a week, especially with what little replacement parts he’d be able to locate on a planet this blissfully _desolate_.

Stabilizing his feet in the sand, he focuses his will into the Force, bending it under the belly of the ship. The essence lifts the starship into the air, at first unearthing it only bit by bit, and then all at once until it emerges fully to the surface. Sand, dirt, and debris cascade from the craft like waterfalls.

Ben feels the immediate ache of exertion in his body. He remembers, quite distantly, when he first began to have lapses with the Force. And his parents – his father, excusing himself to some sector of the galaxy, and his mother, always having something more important to do – banishing him to a life of exilic training with Luke Skywalker.

 _“I warned you about your bloodline,”_ a shadow says to Ben from the dark. He knows this voice is possessed by a mythomaniac with a finger on the pulse of the galaxy, ready to corrupt it, or in the wake of failure, to sever it. _“Weakness festers at the roots of your grandfather’s sacrifice. Weakness, my apprentice, is not suitable for the mighty Bygone Son.”_

Ben recollects himself. At one time, he would have eagerly addressed the ambivalent commentary – but right now, he’s focused on piecing himself back together enough to figure out his next steps, so he pretends not to acknowledge the crawling itch under his skin whenever the voice lunges at him from beyond the stars.

Ben strides up the ship, pulls himself onto the collapsible wings and then into the cockpit. Most of what he had taken with him is already crammed in the bag, but he still digs up a half-empty water canister, a box of medical supplies, and from the hidden compartment above the pilot’s seat, his lightsaber.

He throws back whatever’s left in the canister. Jakku’s sweltering heat is borderline intolerable compared to the tepid and often wet climate from the temple’s location. (Ben recalls the heat of the flames, the ash smudged on his cheek.)

 _“Adaption is a genetic trait,”_ the voice says snidely. It feels like a hand, grasping Ben’s shoulder. _“You will be more than Luke Skywalker ever was. Do not disparage your capabilities.”_

He diverts his gaze to his knees.

_“It seems you still falter over fresh wounds, and for that, I will allow you margin. Do not allow weakness to deter your path.”_

The hand on his shoulder is gone. Ben waits, his breath suspended at the apex of his chest, but he is ultimately, and utterly, alone, and breathes.

He climbs out of the X-Wing and stands in the shadow of the ship to escape the blistering sunlight. The lightsaber is turned over in his hands, metallic finish glistening when it catches a sliver of light; betrayal sets against his stomach with the presence of a rock. Anger, repulsion, conflict – all previously enfolded within him in hopes they would pass and he could justify his uncle’s behavior with a clear conscious, yet they continue to amplify, building momentum. His closest family member was _afraid_ of him. _Ashamed_ of him. Ben trusted Luke Skywalker to show him the path to the light and in a brief lapse of clarity, of some sick kind of vehement _betrayal_ , decided that he was beyond helping his venerated nephew. In his eyes, Ben Solo was better off dead.

_(I warned you about your bloodline.)_

The call of the dark and the pull of the light, they collide within him, surging forth like a broken dam. Ben hits the switch on his lightsaber and the kyber crystal _snaps_ under the force of his pure and misaligned _hatred_ for the ones who were supposed to _love_ him.

Crimson, roaring, shredding energy rips through the X-Wing’s hull. Metal bends and melts, conforming to each blow from the bleeding lightsaber, sawed through by the unhinged anger of a man who’s lost everything. His anger is tearing outwards in a fury of screaming, of outright despair and the agonizing disposition of becoming absolutely _nothing_ at the hands of his family’s rejection and his spiritual regression.

He doesn’t know who to blame more: himself, or his uncle.

The rage passes as soon as it explodes forward. The damage to the X-Wing is extensive, scraps of charred metal dropping into the sand like raindrops.

Ben discards the saber, the unstable energy disappearing with the loss of contact, and he lowers himself to his knees. His chest heaves with each agonizing breath, half-sobs, and then a horrible, bewailing scream. He buries his face in his hand as if ashamed of the state he’s devolved into and allows the pain to come.

“Ben?”

He flinches. In his distraction he had barely noticed her presence, always creating a stir in the Force. When he glances at her to his left, his eyes red-rimmed with irritation and glazed over with tears, she looks _frightened_ by him. Everyone is frightened of him, it seems.

“Ben?” she tries again, sounding distant, ghosted by uncertainty.

“He was supposed to _love_ me,” Ben says, his voice breaking. Every part of him wants to throw up the knot in his stomach. “I gave him _everything_.”

Rey’s arms are around him then, her knees digging into the hot sand and her hands, pulling his head to her shoulder. He embraces her everything. The light she exudes, the solitude he can feel pushing under the surface of her skin like glass, and something else, something that pulses between them. He wonders if she feels it, too.

“Come back with me,” she says gently.

They eventually part. Rey’s expression is pitiful, perhaps understanding, but Ben turns away from it and gradually collects his lightsaber, rising to his feet. He faces her, pulling up his hood. “Why did you follow me?” he asks then. There’s a tremor to his tone.

Rey gestures to the northern horizon. His gaze follows her index finger to the peak of the sand dunes where the sky reflects their relentless ire, a building typhoon of shadow and of dirt. “I saw a storm coming. We need to return to my shelter before it hits.”

“You would allow a monster like me refuge?”

She pistons out her staff like she’s trying to defend her damaged pride, hitting him squarely in the side, and he grumbles out an expletive in another language. “Now’s not the time for self-pity,” she hisses through her teeth. “You’ll just have to pay me back somehow. That’s how favors work around here.”

“Okay,” he says, massaging what will certainly be a tender bruise, and he follows her without complaint as she trudges off through the desolate terrain.

The X-Wing is left forgotten in the sand.

   

  

  

*

   

  

  

The bedroll is wide enough to fit them both, with Ben on his left side facing out, and Rey on her right side facing into the wall, which leads him to wonder if she hunkered down with him last night as well, just like this. Even with half an inch between them, it feels like entire lifetimes. Outside the AT-AT the sandstorm rages, throwing dirt like missiles against the outer shell, and the sealed hatch rattles, ready to tear open.

Rey turns to face him. “Do you have anywhere to go?”

“Only one place,” he replies, his eyes fixated on the darkness. Part of him is unnerved, convinced that sleep will render new nightmares. Or perhaps, when he awakens again, his uncle will be there, lightsaber raised to delve the killing blow.

“So now what?”

“I will be leaving,” he tells her honestly. And then, “Who are you waiting for?”

She tenses. “What?”

“I saw it, when we touched, a glimpse of your memories. You’ve been here for so long.” He becomes aware of every instance occurring in time, her breath fanning against the back of his neck, the earthy aroma of her hovel, the dry heat permeating the air. “I see the ships, the parts you scavenge and the ones you pilot, and I feel it, your loneliness and your hope. Late at night, when you have trouble falling asleep, you imagine an ocean…and I see it, that island from your dreams.”

Rey grits her teeth. “You don’t have a right to be in there.”

Ben nods an apology, turning on his side to face her. It’s pitch black, but he can sense her with the Force; he can see her outline, her comely features when she moves, the bundle of light in her soul and when she breathes her blood ripples, energy converging outwards and inwards in balance. His fingertips are lifting upwards, carefully towards her forehead. “Would you like to see what I dream of?”

“It is bizarre?”

He huffs out what could pass as a laugh. “Of course not. May I?”

After a beat of thought between them – what would have otherwise been silence is defined by the howling of the sandstorm, the stygian interior, and the groaning of abused metal – she answers. “Yes.”

“Relax,” he tells her, one hand sliding underneath her head to support it, the other grasping the other side of her face. He presses his thumbs to her temples. It’s a trick, recondite by nature so it can’t be taught, but rather figured out, which he would exercise on his uncle during nights when sleep evaded him; sharing serenity if there was little to be salvaged. “Just breathe, don’t fight it.”

She sees his mind, quite clearly – esoteric memories of sacred Jedi training, images and dreams of a cabalistic energy breathing through the bones of the universe, and she has never experienced this power yet it feels like she’s died for it many times over. Ben fastens onto her curiosity and applies his thoughts until she sees it – a sun melts behind the canopy of trees beyond the valley, the cold rush of the nighttime breeze sinking under her skin. The air tastes cool after rainfall. She inhales the acute mountainous scent, agrarian, loamy – and sees the grasslands, moving in waves like water, but silent. She wants to fall into it and keep falling.

“Go with the sun,” he utters under his breath, and she sleeps.

He knows he’s safe here, or as secure as desert badlands can offer him, but it takes quite a while for Ben Solo to trust falling asleep.

   

  

  

*

   

  

  

Rey is typically awake at a particularly early hour every morning, just after the sun begins to mount the far horizon, and it surprises her that when she opens her eyes, the hatch the AT-AT is wide open and Ben is gone. She momentarily expects him to have left, perhaps to begin his ventures to that One Last Place – but his bag is set against the wall, his lightsaber is on the edge of a shelf above her stove, and she hears the faint clamor of metal receiving a few calculated hits.

She stretches, pushes on her booties and treads outside. Ben is meticulously cleaning the sand from every crevice in her repulsorlift speeder. He must sense her with his Jedi Powers or whatever he possesses, because he doesn’t hear her approach but still says, without stealing a glance, “Good morning, did you sleep well?”

Now that he mentions it, that was the best sleep of her life. “Was that a real place?” she asks, her arms crossed.

“Yes,” he replies. With his back turned she can’t discern his expression, and his tone is apprehensive. “That’s where I used to train.”

“It’s much nicer than Jakku.” She pauses, reconsidering her comment. “Everywhere is nicer than Jakku.” He doesn’t reply to that, instead focusing his efforts entirely into his endeavor, and Rey prods him again. “You’re welcome to come scavenging with me, if you can tolerate the weather.”

Ben finally looks at her. “In my bag, you’ll find ration bars.”

She nods and returns inside. Her frivolous attention is strangely drawn to Ben’s lightsaber, splayed out on the shelf – it bears a faint, persistent scent of burning alloy, perhaps from that intense inferno of red energy, which she imagines was _supposed_ to be sleek and juvenescent, a reflection of its wielder’s congruent spirit. Or, something like that. Her knowledge is limited to stories from the unreliable word-of-mouth production line at Niima Outpost.

She glimpses over her shoulder and hears another series of affable bangs against her Speeder, and then reaches up, taking hold of the benevolent saber’s cold hilt. Curiously, she inspects its compelling craftsmanship, the wires seamless and the switch, potent when thumbed at. There’s an underlying whisper, a dynamic strength unfurling beneath promises of sensuality and physicality – a _balance_ , it tells her.

An impression, perhaps a memory, generates in the front of her mind’s eye, showing her the edge of a forest, the same valley Ben projected into her dreams. But it feels different. Wrong. The sky is bleeding and the sun is warm on her back, the grass laps at her legs. Ahead of her, a hollow between two birches is an abyssal maw that croons out a wicked hymn, so faint on the wind she isn’t certain it emits any sound. It beckons her forward.

_Come closer, Child, kindred friend of the Bygone Son – I wish to witness your rebirth._

Rey doesn’t recall moving her legs, she doesn’t have to – not when the branches are crooked fingers, enveloping her slender frame, encouraging her towards the roots of the archaic shadows. There is a lifting, somber voice from within the forest that sings again, neither male nor female but deiform and ancient, behaving like the pendulum of time. _Allow me to beseech your lonely mind, Rey of Light._

She wants to be afraid, she wants to approach it, but a set of hands grapple her shoulders and she slams back into her own reality, trembling, gasping for breath. Her heart is violently throwing itself against her chest. She clutches Ben’s lightsaber to her breastbone even as she struggles to reject it.

Ben's grip is gentle, careful. “Rey. Don’t be afraid, I’m here.”

“I’m sorry, I – I didn’t mean – what was—?”

He slowly maneuvers the lightsaber from her fingers. “It’s alright,” he says, bracing her against him with one arm around her back. “Breathe. You connected with the Force. It means you no harm.”

Rey nods, but she’s unsettled by the sheer intensity of her vision and Ben waits until she recollects herself before permitting her space. “I shouldn’t have done that,” she tells him, ashamed of her own adolescent curiosity.

“It was not your doing,” he assures her, hooking the saber to his belt. “Sometimes, especially those gifted with sensitivity towards the Force, they can see the memories of a lightsaber’s previous masters.”

“So that dark place, in the forest—”

He nods. “I can answer all your questions, Rey, but not here. Perhaps while we pick?”

“Scavenge,” she corrects him. “Survive.”

“Yes,” he says, and throws up his hood, “that.”

   

  

  

*

  

   

  

"The term is Force sensitive."

They sit on a runway of pipes nearly twenty stories up from the ground, splitting a ration bar. Rey candidly swings her legs in the open air, heedless of height and how a misstep would certainly crack her skull like an egg. Ben is careful not to mention his inane discomfort with the idea. Her satchel is stuffed with fragments, gears, outdated tech, trash that is loathsome to repair in the current market, but Ben realizes she only has to pawn it off and restoration is the least of her concerns.

"Force sensitive?” she starts, her voice like a shotgun against the hollowed interior of the ancient ship. She turns fully to face him and crosses her legs. He glimpses her once over. “Are you implying I can make things float?”

“That’s not how it works,” he replies dryly.

“Oh. Can you show me how you use the Force?"

Ben studies her as if pondering the odds of planetary alignment. For a full, dilatory minute, she figures he’s going to reject her proposal, but he finishes his half of the ration bar, adjusts his body so they’re almost touching knees, and then gestures out his hand. “Your staff.”

She slips off the quarterstaff and passes it to him. “Please be careful, I’d hate to rebuild it.”

He gives her a knowing look. “Watch.” He sets the stave onto her lap, balancing it precariously on her knees. “I think of a dying sun. Much like you dream of an island, that calming place beyond the precipice of your dreams, I imagine a dying star.” He closes his eyes, her attention is anchored on him. “I imagine the power it must feel, expanding and consuming planets with the maw of a gluttonous beast, and I invoke its meaning."

His hands, reaching between them now, begin to move with precision and the staff careens upwards, snapping into his open palms. Rey watches him in amazement, leaning in, focused.

“I can feel rage,” he continues, opening his eyes again and replacing the staff, “I can feel calm; all that matters is when I feel the Force at its peak.”

“Can I do something like that?”

He’s moderately charmed by her naïveté. “I have no doubts about your capabilities, but you have to _feel_ it.” He scopes out her wrists and draws them in to hover the staff. “Close your eyes.”

She hesitates, only briefly, perhaps recalling the beckoning darkness from the forest. Her resolve lurches forward to replace her uncertainty all the same. “Okay,” she says, doing as instructed.

“Good. Now breathe, and find the energy. It’s a constant that moves through you, through me, through the galaxy and its particles. Reach out with your feelings, with your mind. Find its wavelength, its purpose.”

The staff, to his marvel, begins to move. Inching up, stuttering, falling. He loosens his grasp on her wrists, anticipating another twitch, and he wonders if there might be a lesser clout in her past that barricades the runways of her spirit.

“And the connection,” he continues, elated, “feel the Force like blood. A heartbeat. Pulsing.” Her hands are suddenly on his, chasing the throb in this galaxy’s heartbeat where their entwined lives are folded between a rift and a thought, moving up to his forearms and they _connect_. “What do you see?”

“I don’t know, it’s – Jakku, the harsh deserts and a spring…” She trails off, faltering. “I’m losing—”

“That’s alright, focus on what you still see.” His hands gradually close the gap between them and fasten to either side of her face, the pads of his thumbs flat against her sun-kissed skin. He solidifies her vision of sinking sands, bones, hunger, and with them, starlight, birth, open skies. “We have a bond with the Force, with each other. Even apart we are always together; you and me, you and the universe. Understand that yesterday and tomorrow are not consecutive and that they are a _necessity_.”

Whatever she’s chasing must lead her back, because she opens her eyes, and he’s compelled to lean towards her as she pulls herself into him, and they kiss. There’s a moment between them, caught, the unspoken _take whatever you want from me,_ that ghosts along their connection, and trudging beneath it, Ben hears the voice from beyond the stars.

_Weakness is has no place amongst our kind, and I sense that you are becoming weak. It’s time for your departure, mighty Bygone Son._

 

 

   

*

   

  

  

“What you have brought me today is worth”—Unkar Plutt turns a spruced-up compression board in his hand, feigning calculation like a monarch in favor of peasants when Ben doubts the guy has any conceptual understanding of basic math—“hnnm, _one_ portion.”

Rey remains quiet, although her disappointment is palpable, and she wordlessly collects the packets of portion bread yeast. Ben lingers beside her Speeder with his hood cast down now that the calescent sun is melting behind the far dunes and the cooler dusk breeze migrates across the plains. He seems perplexed.

“Do you always receive so little?” he asks when she returns to him.

“Today is one of his better days.”

“I see.” Ben briefly casts his sable eyes to Plutt’s trading post. “If I had any say in the matter, I would slice him open, here”—he jabs his forefinger against her naval and slides it up the centerfold of her torso, mimicking the cruel edge of a blade—“to here.” He stops at her chin. A hesitation, an expectation.

She quirks her eyebrow. “Is that the Jedi way?”

“I suppose it is.”

Her gaze narrows. “It’s very difficult to tell when you’re making a joke, Ben Solo, _especially_ when you’ve mastered the habit of morbidity.”

“That is also the Jedi way.”

“Ahuh.” She folds her arms against her chest. “I don’t suppose it would follow code, then, to hide the remains and steal all the portion yeast I possibly can? And by that logic, what’s to stop me from killing everyone and claiming this town as my own?”

“I’m assuming this scenario has crossed your mind before.”

When she tilts her head up at him like a coin toss, she notices he’s quite serious, his previous bouts of humor sedated by genuine concern. Austerity is in his nature, perhaps, or maybe she crossed a line, mistaking his mild gag for pensive apathy. Either way, she relents.

“A place like _this_ ,” she says solemnly, “how could I _not_?” She diverts his attention to Unkar Plutt, bargaining with Teedo over a handful of assembled weapons parts. “How could I possibly not?”

And something about that screams, _yes, that is the Jedi way_.

   

  

  

*

   

  

  

When Rey awakens that night, it’s to an abhorrent pain in her chest, and to Ben Solo, his bag hefted onto his shoulder. The sting in the ravine between her ribs is not from him but because of him and all the instances of her life that are beyond his control – he must have been banking on her remaining asleep, since he freezes when she mumbles his name.

He kneels down at her bedside and takes her hand. “It’s time for me to go.”

“You don’t have to leave,” she utters through the exhaustion. “You can stay, as long as you like—”

“You can come with me.”

“I can’t.” Her voice cracks, her tears begin to collect at the edges of her eyes. “I’m waiting for them. I have to be here when they get back, but I don’t – I’m – Ben, please, _stay_. Don’t leave me alone.”

“You’re not alone,” he tells her honestly. “Remember what I told you. So long as the Force moves through this universe, you and I will be connected. You can go anywhere, experience everything – Rey, we will meet again, no matter what.”

“Promise me,” she says, her tears slumping down her cheeks. “Don’t be like them and _promise_ me.”

He lifts his forefinger to his chest, right over his heart, and carves an X. “Now breathe," he whispers as his hand eclipses her face. His voice is caught between the oblivion of time and space and she drifts towards the light bound by its frills to the unending lull of sleep. The horizon of Jakku blazes in the final sliver of daylight. "Close your eyes, Rey of Light, and go with the sun."

   

  

  

*

 

 

   

Ben Solo is gone.

   

  

  

*

   

  

  

The years come and go, tomorrow, today, and the day before are never consecutive, an anomaly of the universe. Rey thinks of Ben Solo almost daily for the first few months, missing the presence of a companion, occasionally touching her lips when the memory of him overstays its welcome. But she falls into her regular routine of scavenging and bartering parts as if he had never disrupted her life at all, and soon, he’s little better than a stranger in the recesses of her mind.

(She realizes now that he never did pay her back.)

Five years later, 22-year-old Rey, a scavenger bound to the febrile sands of Jakku, sits against the foot of her AT-AT Walker, studying the horizon as starships take to the sky with purpose and fervor. She attempts to harness the Force and lift her plate with that mystifying power, but as always, it budges a few inches at best.

Defeated, she stuffs the last piece of her portion bread into her lips, stubbornly chews and swallows –

And somewhere over her shoulder, she hears a droid, calling for help.

   

  

  

*

    

   

  

“Anything else?”

The informant nervously bunches his hat up in his hands, heavy as bad luck, ruining the smooth argent folds, and he can feel the horrid dread clawing its way through his chest. The neurotic and downright terrifying Kylo Ren was only fractionally frightening when compared to his exalted master, but he was still an eternally conflicted force of nature, and he had just finished annihilating a block of defenseless control panels with an equally unstable lightsaber. So naturally, the tension is a bulwark against the walls of the room, and rightfully, the man wishes he were behind it, out of sight out of mind.

The informant swallows the rock in his throat. “Th-they were accompanied by a girl—”

Kylo Ren’s grasp on the man’s neck is without mercy. The Force, when possessed by those without spiritual hindrance, is cruel and equivocal, inconsequential to the cosmos but baffling to those without the gift, so the informant is rightfully scared for his life.

The BB-8 unit is roaming the galaxy with the map to Luke Skywalker, evading detection with the help of the traitorous FN-2187, and now, as if by some humorless divergence in fate—

“What. _Girl?”_

   

  

   


End file.
